Growing opportunities to collect and leverage digital information have led many managers to change how they make decisions – relying less on intuition and more on data. As Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape quipped, “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” Following pathbreakers such as Caesar’s CEO Gary Loveman – who attributes his firm’s success to the use of databases and cutting-edge analytical tools – managers at many levels are now consuming data and analytical output in unprecedented ways.

This should come as no surprise. At their most fundamental level, all organizations can be thought of as “information processors” that rely on the technologies of hierarchy, specialization, and human perception to collect, disseminate, and act on insights. Therefore, it’s only natural that technologies delivering faster, cheaper, more accurate information create opportunities to re-invent the managerial machinery.

At the same time, large corporations are not always nimble creatures. How quickly are managers actually making the investments and process changes required to embrace decision-making practices rooted in objective data? And should all firms jump on this latest managerial bandwagon?

We recently worked with a team at the U.S. Census Bureau and our colleagues Nick Bloom of Stanford and John van Reenen of the London School of Economics to design and field a large-scale survey to pursue these questions in the U.S. manufacturing sector. The survey targeted a representative group of roughly 50,000 American manufacturing establishments.

Our initial line of inquiry delves into the spread of data-driven decision making, or “DDD” for short. We find that the use of DDD in U.S. manufacturing nearly tripled between 2005 and 2010, from 11% to 30% of plants. However, adoption has been uneven. DDD is primarily concentrated in plants with four key advantages: 1) high levels of information technology, 2) educated workers, 3) greater size, and 4) better awareness.

Four factors are driving data-driven decision-making:

IT: DDD is more extensive in firms that have already made significant IT investments. Quite intuitively, firms make better use of DDD when they have more sophisticated IT to track, process, and communicate data. Likewise, they enjoy higher returns from IT when it guides decision-making and action at the firm.

College degrees: Having a larger share of workers (including both managers and non-managers) with Bachelor’s degrees also predicts the use of DDD. This may reflect the way formal education can make people more comfortable with quantitative and data-centric ways of understanding the world.

Size: Both single-plant firms, and those with multiple plants are increasing their reliance on DDD at roughly the same rate. However, single-plant establishments are still at less than half the adoption level of their bigger brethren (see Figure 1). That’s no surprise — plants that belong to larger, multi-unit firms have the advantage of being able to learn from each other and share infrastructure.

Awareness: Last but not least, even DDD-ready firms may lag behind due to a simple lack of awareness about its benefits. In order to adopt DDD, firms first have to learn about emerging practices and how they might work (or not) in their particular organization. Plants that report a larger number of opportunities to learn about new management practices – like hearing about it from other units of the same firm, from outside consultants or new employees, or from trade associations or supply chain partners – are far more likely to report being at the frontier of data-driven decision making. If you share this article with your co-workers, you might see your own firm’s use of DDD jump up a notch.

For all its benefits, DDD may not be the path to salvation for every firm. Even managers who have received the DDD gospel may oversee environments that do not permit reliable data collection. For many types of decisions, especially those for which little quantitative data exist, the broader knowledge and experience of leaders still outperforms purely data-driven approaches. Furthermore, the costs of moving to the DDD frontier are not trivial, and may outweigh the benefits – particularly if the scale of operations is just too small.

That said, the tripling of DDD rates in just five years suggests that firms are overcoming any implementation barriers quite rapidly. Our analysis sheds considerable light on what makes DDD a good fit for a wide range of firms. Yet even among plants that are, on paper, likely adopters, only a minority had adopted DDD by the end of our sample period in 2010. We expect adoption to continue to trend upward, as technology costs fall, management practices evolve, and awareness spreads.

Our follow-on research is focused on pinning down how much firms may expect to benefit from DDD, and on discovering the ingredients for success in different settings. No doubt the hype surrounding big data and analytics is great. However, our results offer objective empirical evidence that there is something beyond the hype: firms are rapidly adopting DDD and fundamentally changing how they approach management in the digital age.

Never before was building a brand as important as it is today. Whereas in the past decades, marketing campaigns would focus on selling a product, today it’s all about establishing a brand.

A brand is essentially the story you tell your target audience about who you are; it’s the promise you make to your target audience. It encompasses your credibility, experience and quality. It adds value to who you are whether you are a company or an individual.

Product VS Brand

Products have an expiration date, literally and metaphorically. They can only survive competition for a while; brands on the other hand are forever. It’s essential to market each product, of course, but it’s far more important to constantly be promoting your brand as you create a following that will be behind you independently of your products. The world’s most successful products are those that have a powerful brand behind them to support them. A brand is like the backbone of each campaign to promote a product, this is why you should always focus on establishing your brand. It’s far more likely that you will be able to survive a bad product, if you have a strong brand to back it up. In terms of financial success a brand provides a long-term financial success, whereas a product is only as profitable as it’s cycle lasts.

It Presents Recruiters With a Holistic Image of You

As you see, building a brand is essential if you want to achieve long term success. As an individual you are going to need to promote yourself in various occasions in your life, most notably when you are looking for a job. If you focus on your skills or your qualifications each time you are job-hunting, it’s as if you are focusing on promoting products. The key to having a successful career is being able to promote your personal brand.

Recruiters and potential employers look beyond skills and qualifications. They want to hire people who have a vision, innovation and creativity. And the only way to convince them is by presenting them with who you are as a professional. Fragmented pieces of yourself –what your CV essentially is on its own- might not do the trick. A brand will help recruiters see you as a whole and what you can offer to the company and the position. By establishing your personal brand you will be able to show your potential employer that you know who you are and where you want to go and the self-confidence that will ooze from this image will get them on your side.

Do you want to ensure the future success of your organization? Train your future leaders to grab the baton when you’re ready to leave.

Want to survive? Educate your people.

It’s a simple matter of succession, really. Do you want to ensure the future success of your organization? Train your future leaders to grab the baton when you’re ready to leave.

And still, too many of today’s leaders are paranoid about personal development. “What happens if I train my people and they leave?” they ask.

A better question is this: “What happens if I don’t train them and they stay?”

Time and time again, CPA leaders have told us their top priority is to educate their future leaders, and with good reason: The future of their organization depends on it.

Then, when it’s time to back up those words, they lock up those future leaders and throw away the key. “We’re too busy to train them,” they claim.

What a crock. You’ll busy yourselves right out of existence if you’re not careful.

When you think about it, you’ve got no choice BUT to turn your leaders loose to learn. If you help your people grow, they’ll kill or die for you, and that will strengthen your organization in the process.

And what does your team need to learn? They’ll happily tell you … if you’ll only take the time to listen.

We did a LOT of listening at the 2016 Winning Is Everything Conference in Las Vegas. A panel discussion there featured words of wisdom from both current and future leaders, and the consensus was clear: Get your people out there. Connect them with the profession. Teach them to lead. And remember: You can’t do any of those things by locking your young leaders in their offices.

Allison Harrell: The key to future success? ”I got out there … into the profession and the community. And I spoke my mind. Building relationships is key. Learning people skills is hard, but it’s absolutely essential.”

Jim Boomer: “Get outside of your four walls and learn from others. … You are much more at risk if you don’t invest in your people.”

Gary Boomer: Exposing our team to others outside of our profession helps them grow as CPAs, advisors and people.

Justin O’Horo: Connecting to the profession and the people in it gives you insights that you can bring back to your firm.

Gary Boomer: Professional development is about more than personal growth. It’s tied directly to succession planning. His advice to current leaders: Identify young stars early and get them introduced to the right people. Seed their growth.

Gary Boomer: Firms recognize the need for personal growth but often are still reluctant to send young pros to leadership events. If you don’t give good, young people a growth path, they’ll get stuck, and that leads to cynicism … or departure.

Gary Boomer, channeling Charlie “Tremendous” Jones: “You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”

The bottom line? Educate your people. Make them smarter. Help them grow by introducing them to people who are committed to growth.

If you do that, they’ll stick around. If they stick around, a couple of things will happen: (a) They’ll strengthen your organization, and (b) they’ll strengthen themselves in the process.

Making your future leaders smarter and more loyal? That’s gold … for you AND them.

As we know, the cloud is a platform that allows you to store and process data away from your personal device. The resulting information can then be presented to that or other devices. This is not a new concept. It’s the way computing originated. Programs originally ran on mainframes, mirroring sessions to terminals throughout an organization. But these were expensive options. In the very early days of personal computing, businesses could only afford to provide CFO’s and controllers with spreadsheet applications and $10,000 PCs.

Over time, technology improved, speed increased and costs fell. And just as these lowered costs helped usher the PC into the modern office, so too has the falling cost of cloud storage led to its widespread adoption. Since 2005, the cost per gigabyte of cloud storage has fallen from fifteen cents to less than a penny (see graph below). And the cloud has become a ubiquitous part of our lives, both personal and business.

Nobody could have predicted the personal computing boom and how it would affect the business world. So what more can we expect in the future from the cloud, and how will it change your business? The sky’s the limit, but here are three observations about where we might be headed:

The algorithm rules

More and more, jobs that were previously staffed by human beings have been rendered obsolete via automation. And rudimentary and rote business activities are being superseded by the cloud.

Consider Accounts Payable. As algorithms supplant approval processes, and electronic payments become widespread to the point of being universal, there will be reduced need for human oversight, let alone envelope stuffing. Many of these functions, previously conducted by staff, can be handled with a single algorithm.

The death of the cubicle

With a wholly mobile workforce, a physical presence is less and less required. Business cycles will still be normal, 24/7 affairs, but we’ll be selling from the beach, presenting from the living room and securing shipments in the den. These traditional office functions will not need an office presence.

Home office? No. Everywhere office? Yes — an office in the cloud.

Breaking down hierarchies

This is the most significant benefit of ubiquitous cloud computing: everyone will have access to everything from everywhere — and the elimination of information silos.

What’s next for your business

The new world of work has the power to flip hierarchies on their head, giving workers the power to decide when we work, where we work from and who we work with. And it can give businesses a new type of workforce — a more productive, specialized workforce. It’s due to the mobility provided by the cloud, and our ability to better share and act on critical business information.

When it comes to rogue productivity app downloads, IT is concerned about everything from information silos to security breaches.

The headlines blare: “59 Best Productivity Apps!” “20 Great Productivity Apps for Android, iOS and the Web.” Then there’s the more subtle: “The Best Apps for People With Too Much to Do.”

These articles are wildly popular. Time-strapped people hoping to ‘hack’ their work processes click, read… and download. This doesn’t thrill the IT department. Tech folks have no objection to employees wanting to be more productive, but when each individual mingles dozens of outside devices, tools, and platforms with the corporate network, it can be chaotic.

Showered with productivity and collaboration tools

People love discovering clever, useful applications. If it makes their job easier, good luck getting them not to use it. Here are some of the most widely used, consumer-driven applications.

Dropbox. This is cloud-based storage and file synchronization that gives you access to your files from any personal computer or device. People love this because documents are no longer stored on multiple computers. It’s also a great way to instantly share documents, pictures, or videos with anyone else.

Google Drive. This is also remote storage of documents that (with companion apps Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets) lets you simultaneously co-edit a document with numerous other people. There is also chat and note sharing from within a document.

Evernote. This app is built to capture ideas. It lets you jot down notes, capture images, record meetings, mark up PDFs. Its mastery is storing your ideas in any form, and letting you retrieve them from anywhere.

Skype. This is video conferencing from any device connected to the Internet. It doesn’t have to be video, many people use the VoIP (voice over IP) service to make cheap long distance calls, leave voice and video messages, and share their screen.

LinkedIn. This is the number one professional networking site on the web. It is used to develop all kinds of relationships from finding jobs to job candidates to sales leads to interacting with industry forums. LinkedIn functions for personal career growth as well as often being deeply integrated into corporate functions.

For each of the applications mentioned above – and hundreds of others as well — IT is concerned about everything from information silos (processes that are not streamlined across departments, thereby cutting off collaboration) to security breaches on sensitive corporate information.

But trying to fend off the onslaught of consumer productivity applications is futile. Here are some important guidelines your IT department can consider when balancing this tricky equation:

Get educated on the popular applications

IT organizations must understand those applications that are capturing the imagination of their employees. What function are those apps fulfilling? It is only then they can assess the security, reliability, ease of use, and integration into the existing infrastructure. Don’t guess what people are using ask them.

Coordinate cross-functional groups

It’s important to understand how different departments are using popular applications. To streamline processes, you can’t assume that everyone is using LinkedIn or Google Drive the same way. Gathering a cross-functional working group across departments and functions will give a much better picture of how important it is to integrate certain applications over others.

Explore integration tools

Time for some introspection. How easy is it to fold outside apps onto the network? What about streamlining them across teams and departments? Social networks for example, are crucial business tools for market research. But if they aren’t connected to marketing, CRM and other business-critical systems, valuable insights might not be shared with everyone. Integration platforms are worth investigating. They are helping pull in unstructured data from social networks and other databases and made available on the corporate network.

Mobile, mobile, mobile

Most employees use one smart phone for work and play: their own. The vast majority of companies have made both policy and software changes because of this. Should IT have an inventory of apps running on mobile devices? Should there be a blacklist? It’s worth investigating Mobile Application Management (MAM) tools that help IT support consumer applications while maintaining enterprise security, through authentication, access policy and enforcement, encryption, monitoring and other features.

Managing a network requires gatekeeping, facilitating the common language and workflow within the organization, and of course an eye on security. Fortunately, with some guidelines and possibly new integration technology in place, IT can keep the network humming, productivity up, and employees free to explore better ways to work.

Without a combined effort, strengthening IT security isn’t just difficult, it’s virtually impossible.

I went through our CRM and saw that the rest of the team wasn’t using it. I wasn’t even the manager. I was a sales rep who just wanted to know if someone was already working a prospect I found.

Someone had put the contact information into the CRM … but left no notes. Did they have a call? Did they email the buyer? If they did, what did they talk about? To make it worse, this colleague was on vacation, so I couldn’t call to ask.

This happened over and over again. I’d find a prospect, but realize they were already in the CRM, with no notes.

CRM usage wasn’t my problem. It was my manager’s responsibility to make everyone use the CRM. I knew she was 10 times as frustrated as I was about our team not properly inputting data.

Unsurprisingly, my old team wasn’t the only one having this problem (plus dozens more). Through a survey of over 700 sales professionals, we found the biggest challenges sales teams face.

In today’s competitive and fast-moving business world, most organizations need to quickly adapt to new markets and opportunities, and to get the most out of their valuable assets like data. Data governance (DG) is an important approach to optimizing business processes and the data that flows through them, eliminating redundancies and creating accountability.

Data governance consists of:

redefining organizational principles,

changing decision-making,

increasing collaboration across the organization, and

cultural maturity (very important and typically overlooked).

While much of data governance involves people, practices and processes, software plays an important part in executing a worthwhile data governance initiative too.

Partnering business people with IT teams to choose and implement a software solution better ensures that the overall data governance program not only meets a range of business requirements, but can scale to handle future needs, provides cohesive data across all channels, and supports a consistent working environment.

But it’s still important to remember that while software provides the right tools, it’s not going to do the work to create an effective data governance program.

Facilitating Organizational Change

Starting the process for organizational change may require third party facilitation. This ensures an objective observer with no hidden agenda. Maybe it’s just having someone who can ask questions without fear of retribution. Or maybe it’s that your people are just too close to their processes, and without proper coaching, they won’t be able to handle change.

But it’s also about “first things first” – preparing for a project that may require change. And data governance, in many ways, is all about change. It changes decision-making responsibilities; changes accountability among those involved in the processes, work flows and processes; and inevitably, changes the way your business works.

A consultant can help you build the business case to highlight the benefits of implementing data governance. If you end up doing this on your own without a third party who has experience in the field, you may end up missing some important nuggets.

Business Case Development

The business case for data governance probably sits side by side with another data initiative, like a requirement for better product data management. If so, the development of a business case will, of course, reflect the needs of that initiative.

It’s important to bring IT and the business together at this point, to develop a collaborative base and to build alliances around what the business needs, not just to decide on a technology solution. In the business case, current challenges should be identified, along with any pertinent quantitative measurements to support the case.

Industry trends lend additional credibility to the report. The benefits should reflect a match between the trends and the challenges. A heuristic pricing model will help with the thoroughness, with some specific benefits wrapping up the report.

Building a Team

The right mix of people is a critical component of the data governance agenda. There are typically many kinds of personalities and job functions that need to be considered.

For instance, you can’t just bring in all the “yes men” and the people that have a positive outlook or want to see change. You’ll also need those who are contrary, don’t want to change, and may actually be a bit negative.

What you might find is that the ones you least expect can turn on a dime and become your most enthusiastic evangelists. Why is this? Because they feel they’re being asked for their input and they want to contribute.

Additionally, a DG leader will need to be appointed or elected. The responsibility of the leader will be to maintain the team’s integrity, through minutes, schedules and creating ongoing enthusiasm for the launch and maintenance of data governance.

The Data Governance Charter

Setting up a DG charter is the groundwork needed to develop any future data management goals, maintenance and change. The charter itself is nothing more than a document that outlines who to go to when changes to data management are required.

Providing the Definitions for Data Management

The company will continue to evolve, and so will the data, people and processes. The definition of how such evolution will work resides in the charter.

Here are some key areas that need to be addressed in a data governance charter:

Workflow Statuses – These are the steps to be followed as data makes its way through the enterprise. These need to be flexible, dynamic, and logical. But we’ve found that there’s no single workflow that serves a company through all of their data management steps. The obvious ones are “New Product Introductions” and “Product Data Maintenance.” But each of those could have multiple options, like New Product Introductions (NPI) that come from suppliers vs. manufacturers. Defining and maintaining these will be a key responsibility of the DG Team.

Responsibilities – With the workflow statuses comes the responsibilities of the people performing the work in each of those statuses. Defining those should stabilize after the first several months of a DG initiative, but as companies grow, management changes, and customer demands grow, so will the resources, table of organizations and marketing strategies – all of which can have an effect on who does what and when.

Security and Privileges – Part of a DG initiative will center not only on who is responsible, but also who is NOT responsible. Therefore, setting up security and privileges will come from that. An example of this would be data entry points. It’s not just important to enter data once, but it’s also important who enters the data, who can edit data, and where the data is entered. Many data management software providers preach the “enter once, use many” mantra within their solution – but it’s also about the single point of entry, which could (and probably should) be in multipleintegrated systems.

Communication – There needs to be a standard time for the team to meet, and it should be treated as untouchable. Weekly minutes and action items need to be compiled and tracked. These meetings may start out more frequent, but they should never go away completely. Finding ways to make them engaging will be an ongoing challenge for the DG leader.

Integration Points – A diagram (Visio, Omnigraffle, white board) needs to be created depicting all the integration points and how they are managed. A graphical representation seems to not just help in understanding, but it also serves as a conversation starter. These are typically invaluable documents and continue to evolve as the project progresses.

Syndication Points – Similar to the integration point diagram, having a syndication map is also advantageous. This is typically more dynamic and may be a spin-off of the integration point diagram.

Data Quality – The key to tracking DQ is to align on with which normalizations to start, but also the considerations, approval and implementation of DQ changes, modifications or maintenance requirements. This can affect what appears in lists, how new data is captured, and new auto-fill content.

Data Stewardship – Concisely written guides for data stewards to follow will be a part of the charter. The first draft and approval cycle are best done as a part of the process design. After that, changes should be part of the data governance maintenance cycle.

Single Best Point of Entry – Having an entry point in one location may be the mantra of some “central source of the truth” providers. But a more logical definition is not only to have entry of data once, but it also to have it in the best point of entry. Therefore, a single piece of content may be in separate systems, but the key is to not re-enter content in multiple places (or systems). Integration of data between systems then becomes critical, along with the privileges of those attributes. DG provides the definitions of these points of entry, where they are and who will perform them – as well as any changes that need to happen as systems and data evolve.

RASCI Development

Identifying what groups and people fall into the following categories creates clarity and accountability. This typically becomes a widely used document:

Responsible – The person who is responsible for delivering the project/task.

Accountable – The person who has ultimate accountability and authority. They are the ones to whom “R” is accountable.

Informed – The person or group who needs to be notified of results or actions, but are not needed for decision-making.

Maturity Model

The development of a maturity model helps in identifying the priority factoring exercise, but more from a marketing implementation perspective. The “state of maturity” in a data management initiative may follow these descriptions:

Stages to Define

Product To Market – What is the maturity of getting products to market?

Data Management – What is the maturity of managing data?

Technology – What is the maturity of the technology being used?

Content Enrichment – What is the maturity of how content is enriched?

SEM – What is the maturity of search engine marketing?

Marketing – What is the maturity of the marketing group around using data?

Coordinated – triggered workflows, solution implemented but not optimized, roadmap defined but not implemented, data centralized but not implemented, tools in place but not implemented, coordinated marketing for some channels, DG team and charter in place

Priority Factoring

Part of determining an approach to implementation is setting priorities. There are eight factors we typically review to do this. At a high level, the exercise includes a matrix developed around these parameters:

Sequence – Does it make sense to proceed in a particular order?

Dependencies – Do the activities have dependencies on each other that create that sequence?

Resources – Do the resources have enough time to handle the implementation responsibilities? If not, what can be done to limit involvement in outside distractions?

Opportunities – What business opportunities will be gained OR missed during the implementation process?

Capacity – Is there capacity to handle the current load (technologically, knowledge expertise, infrastructure, etc.) and how can those be managed?

Demand – How does the demand on the business get affected and what is the demand to make the change?

Efficiency – Will the gains expected from the project outweigh the challenges of the project?

Productivity – Will the expected productivity improvement outweigh the challenges of the project?

Maintaining Data Governance

Keeping the DG team’s enthusiasm and momentum going can be a difficult challenge. Ongoing meetings should be kept sacred and the continuity of the team should be kept as consistent as possible.

Meetings – Don’t be tempted to have these as optional. Even if nothing is on the agenda, sparking a dialog may lead to pertinent conversations around the data. There’s always something going, it just needs to get facilitated into a conversation.

Communications – Follow the old rule:

Tell them what you’re going to tell them (put out an agenda)

Tell them (the meeting)

Tell them what you told them (after meeting notes)

Don’t limit the notes to just the team – it’s good for other key players to hear what is going on, since that may lead to additional insights.

Charter Maintenance – The charter is a dynamic document. It is not an “etched in stone” guide. But there needs to be appropriate accountability on its upkeep. It will be looked at for reference. Consider the charter an agenda item for each meeting.

In the next installment (Part 2), we’ll talk about the challenges and drivers that businesses need to understand to make data management changes and how that fits into data governance. We’ll also talk about a fun exercise – capturing the current state.